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Books: Keeping Food Fresh

Facts

Author: The Gardeners and Farmers of Terre Vivante
ISBN: 1-890132-10-1
Paperback: 197 pages
Publisher: Chelsea Green

The Back Cover

For the Kitchen Poet Who Rhymes "Nutritious" with "Delicious"

Typical books about preserving garden produce nearly always assume that modern "kitchen gardeners" will boil or freeze their vegetables and fruits. Yet here is a book that goes back to the future – celebrating traditional but little-known French techniques for storing and preserving fresh edibles in ways that maximize flavor and nutrition.

Translated into English for the first time, this book deliberately ignores freezing and high-temperature canning in favor of methods that are superior because they are less costly and more energy-efficient.

As Eliot Coleman says in his foreword, "The Poetry of Food,""Food preservation techniques can be divided into two categories: the modern scientific methods that remove the life from food, and the natural ‘poetic’ methods that maintain or enhance the life of food. The poetic techniques produce…foods that have been celebrated for centuries and are considered gourmet delights today."

Keeping Food Fresh offers more than 250 easy and enjoyable recipes featuring locally grown and minimally refined ingredients.

Excerpts from the Introduction

Preservation Without Nutrient Loss

Canning or freezing, with few exceptions, these seem to be our only choices when we want to enjoy ready-to-eat fruits and vegetables out of season. As it is used today, the word “preserves” (like the French word conserves) evokes little more than food in cans or jars, preserved through sterilization. However, the original sense of the word was much broader, encompassing all known methods of food preservation.

These days, frozen foods tend to replace canned and bottled goods, since foods lose fewer nutrients through cold than through heat. But freezing is not very satisfactory either: it is expensive, consumes a lot of energy, and destroys many of the vitamins. In the home kitchen, we observe the same development as we have seen in industry: Canning, which was very popular in the 1960s (country folks each with their own sterilizers, putting up their own green beans, shell peas, and tomatoes), has given way to freezing. Emerging relatively recently (sterilization in the nineteenth century, freezing in the twentieth century), these two processes have relegated traditional food-preservation methods to obscurity, if not complete oblivion, as their scope of application has dwindled away. By far, the best example of displacement is lactic fermentation. Formerly used to preserve all sorts of vegetables, it has survived solely for making sauerkraut, and at that, more for gastronomic reasons than as a preservation process in its own right.

Fortunately, the traditional methods of preservation still live on in the French countryside, although they are rapidly disappearing. There is a wealth of knowledge to be gathered here before it falls into anonymity. This, then, is one of the goals of this book. Nevertheless, far from presenting a study of “preservation ethnology,” this collection is meant to be a practical guide. Every recipe we have included is still in use; some have even been enhanced by the advent of new technology, such as high-performance solar dryers, and water-sealed lactic-fermentation jars.

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